The Whip And The Body (1963)

When a film communicates two emotions happening across a character’s face, all in the one shot, the magic trick of that. In the Mario Bava directed film, The Whip and The Body (1963), there’s a tremendous close-up of the character of Nevenka (Dahlia Lavi), walking down a darkened castle hallway, approaching a door where she […]

The Oracle (1985)

After seeing the repulsive yet effective thriller, Tenement, I was interested to see more of director Roberta Findlay’s mainstream 1980s genre work, after a previous decade of working in exploitation and pornography. The Oracle (1985) is a low-budget supernatural horror movie that uses the planchette as its hook – a silver artificial hand in a […]

The Grapes Of Death (1978)

When choosing something to watch, there’s often a scene early on that clinches for me whether I’ve made the right choice or not. For The Grapes Of Death (1978), directed by French exploitation filmmaker Jean Rollin, when the protagonist Elizabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal) is running for her life through the French countryside, completely alone within the […]

Things (1989)

“He must have been hit by spontaneous combustion, I’ve read about that shit…” A long time ago, I remember being over at a friend’s house, and they were working on a low-budget horror short, and played it for me on a VCR. Watching Things (1989) feels like that experience but taken to a transcendent level. […]

Body Melt (1993)

When the younger cop pulled off his shades to reveal it was Andrew Daddo… a powerful surge ran through me. As a local council mayor said recently during a radio interview, “Think global, act local.” And genres can always travel internationally, globally, such as horror with lots of gore and goop. But that local touch, […]